1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for diagnosing the causes of anomalies within electronic systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique for resolving a “no-trouble-found” (NTF) condition in electronic systems.
2. Related Art
As electronic commerce grows increasingly more prevalent, businesses are increasingly relying on electronic systems, such as computer systems, to process ever-larger volumes of electronic transactions. As a consequence, a failure in one of these computer systems can be disastrous, potentially resulting in millions of dollars of lost business. Moreover, a failure can seriously undermine consumer confidence in a business, making customers less likely to purchase goods and services from the business.
When computer systems fail, it is often due to an intermittent failure. During such failures, it is common for components, subsystems, or entire computer systems to indicate they have failed by either ‘crashing’ or otherwise halting processing, with or without writing failure messages to a system log file. “No-Trouble-Found” (NTF) events arise when a service engineer is dispatched to repair a failed computer system (or when the failed computer system is returned to the manufacturer) and the computer system runs normally with no indication of a problem.
NTF events can significantly increase warranty and operational expenses, including the expenses associated with: the allocation of limited engineering resources to field issues; increased repair times, and the associated reduction in repair-center throughput; increased spare-part inventories; and/or increased component scrap rates. In addition, NTF events can adversely impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. In particular, it is embarrassing when a manufacturer is unable to determine the root cause of a problem. Customers are generally happier when a root cause can be determined, because this gives the customer some assurance that the root cause has been corrected, and is therefore not likely to cause a further disruption in the customer's business.
Moreover, existing approaches for diagnosing failures in computer systems are often ad hoc. For example, they may be based on anecdotal success stories or subjective personal preference(s). Consequently, a test that previously worked well in identifying a particular failure mechanism may be used to try to diagnose a suspect computer system, which may have a different failure mechanism. Hence, this approach may be unable to induce a failure during an allotted time interval and engineers may erroneously conclude that an NTF event has occurred in the computer system.
Hence, what is needed is a technique for resolving NTF conditions in electronic systems, without the above-described problems.